OpenDyslexic | Hacker News Reader

OpenDyslexic

opendyslexic.org

19 pointsxqcgrek29 comments

I find this much harder to read, but I'm not dyslexic. I was expecting it to be easier to read for people without dyslexia as well.

I had no idea that dyslexics would rotate letters in their minds. As far as I understand that's what the heavy lower portions of the letters is supposed to fix. I find it really hard to read upside-down.

But I'm glad it helps people. It's really good to see it's available on more and more devices like my Kindle.

how about this? https://imgur.com/a/fdbfZ2m

this is a quick experiment I did to apply color highlights to english book the same way we do it with programming language in IDE.

I also find that much harder to read :) For me the colour distracts from the text because I tend to look for colour to carry a separate meaning (separate from the letters itself). So every letter that stands out my brain is searching for that extra meaning. And the split vowels are harder too, but probably just because I'm not used to them.

However I'm not dyslexic! I don't really know how that works. You should test it with them, perhaps it would really benefit them.

the color do carry a separate meaning. Each group of letter is a digraph and make one of the 44 english sounds.

if you didn’t know that it’s because your old enough to have learn to read using « sight word/ whole word» method. instead of using the new « phonics » method.

This is also probably why it make it harder for you to read it. Because your brain is not trying to recognize syllable or sound but instead to recognize each word as a whole unit.

To add another data point. This is much harder to read for me compared to the non-coloured text. However, I am not dyslectic. The colour is distracting, my mind is trying to figure out what those colours mean, and how it should interpret them. Thinking about that, maybe it gets better with time. My mind would figure out those colours and use that information to read faster.

As a dyslexic this is not something that would have helped me. Learning "sight words" in normal fonts as a kid trained me to end up reading faster than most people. Even to this day. What messes me up is odd fonts and poor kerning. I am basically programmed with word based OCR. I love the effort- if you have dyslexic kids I would suggest you do what I did with mine. Make letters out of play dough or clay with your kids. Then they can translate the 2d images into 3d spatial representations.

Hi!

Could you please elaborate on what learning "sight words" mean?

I'm a little bit concerned my daughter might have dyslexia, but she is too young to be evaluated according to the standards here.

Anything I can do to help her pick up reading better would be appreciated.

I am not dyslexic and don't claim to know which is better, but this article claims Apple's San Fransisco typeface is better than OpenDyslexic;

https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/iso-9-san-francisco-font/

The reasoning is that dyslexia seems to rotate symbols. OpenDyslexic tries to solve this by giving each symbol a "fat bottom" so to speak. This may work, but may also be heavy-handed.

San Fransisco keeps a classic sans-serif design but just makes each letter look distinct, even when rotated. This has the benefit of the font being "readable" to people without dyslexia, because it follows conventional design standards as well.

  Take my info with a grain of salt though.

some past comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24036563

Reply on news.ycombinator.com